SILVER SCREEN

I suppose it is the duty of parents to nurture and protect, but I sometimes wonder if mine once went a mite too far in attempting to keep me away from some perceived evil. It happened during the latter years of the last War, when I was about ten years' old, the focus of my interest at that particular moment being - and it was something my father and I saw on our regular walks in that area of town - a squat, modest building with steps leading up to front doors and the letters GEM emblazoned across the front. Though I did not know it at the time it was called a cinema, and to my way of thinking it looked interesting. Dad, however, may have thought I was too young for such things.
'What's that?' I asked, pointing. It's a place where they show pictures, he replied, somewhat hesitantly (if I recall the conversation correctly). 'What pictures?' I asked. I'll show you, he said. The doors to the GEM were closed and there was no-one about, so we walked confidently up the steps and stopped in front of a large glass-fronted showcase fixed to the wall, filled with posters and photographs. These pictures, he said.
I looked at them disappointedly, having expected something more. These images, however, seemed of only momentary interest, and so after scanning them quickly we clattered back down the steps and walked towards town, dad no doubt relieved that he needed to invent no further explanations, me hoping that the Mars bar shop might be open.

This parental ruse did not cover things up for long, of course, and it was schoolfriends who finally filled in some of the detail. What is more, they talked knowingly of the Saturday morning children's matinee, available at very cheap rates, where Tarzan and Johnny Mack Brown, Don Watson and the US Navy, Abbot & Costello, Charlie Chaplin and George Formby could be seen and heard along with the latest newsreels.
The earliest film I can actually remember seeing featured Sabu the elephant boy, though the image which even now, 70 years' later, still comes to mind is one of a crashed aeroplane in the jungle which had been undiscovered for so that creepers and exotic vegetation had grown all over it. It was something I seemed to associate with the War. However, the cinema did finally suck me in, and I have been a film fan ever since, placing the silver screen above television and even above live theatre in my entertainment affections.
I was recalling the other day that of the many hundreds of films I must have watched since the scruffy GEM issued its siren call, I have walked out of only two. One was Last Year in Marienbad, which according to my uncomprehending mind was a film of monumental tedium, and other a much more recent thing full of confused images and patterns interspersed with what seemed like brief scenes of 1950s family life.
After about 20 minutes of total bewilderment we quietly picked up our coats and tip-toed back to the silent comfort of the foyer, only to find another ten people standing there. 'Welcome to the club,' someone said with great irony. 'What on earth was that all about?' No-one knew. The cinema manager, hovering nearby, smiled thinly and tried to think of something to say.
But this was a rare cinematic failure, and one I don't begrudge because in the main it has been a wonderful journey with hundreds of nights of fascinating stories along the way. Gone With the Wind all the way to Lincoln, Doris Day to Sandra Bullock, and Clarke Gable to Daniel Day Lewis, they have all worked their magic and fired my imagination.  

BROUGHT TO BOOK

Once, and in a no-doubt desperate attempt to curb my moaning that, 'I haven't got anything to do.' Or perhaps to placate me during one of my frequent bouts of croup. I cannot remember which. Anyway, my father gave me his set of encyclopedias. Straight off the shelf, as it were. I promptly spread all nine volumes over the carpet in our 'front' room, and was immediately engrossed, and an hour or so later had to be called to come and get my tea. Thus his manoeuvre worked, a brilliant fatherly response to what must have been a tiresome situation. Only later did I realise that the encyclopedias were very close to my father's heart, and that he had given away something he held precious and perhaps irreplaceable.   
Over sixty years later I still have them, for the red-bound set has followed me from south Lincolnshire to Norfolk, and within Norfolk, from Norwich to Wicklewood to Wymondham and latterly to Sheringham, where they still fill eighteen and a half inches of shelf space.
Of course, any self-respecting second hand bookshop has a set of encyclopedia available for sale - just as they will have a set of Dickens, or the plays of Shakespeare - but they are not a currently popular choice. In fact, and from a bookshop perspective, they must be quite hard to shift as they are, of course, usually out-of-date.
My set, the set my father gave me, rejoices under the umbrella title of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia, published by The Amalgamated Press Ltd. They are, no doubt, also out-of-date, and I am sure most of the entries are available online. But I love them, still look at them, and quite regularly use them.
I am not certain how my father acquired them, but there was a family story that, as a young man, he had painstakingly purchased the volumes, section by section, and then had them bound. If so, they must have been cheap, because in his early years he worked in a Cotswolds' woollen mill and then as a junior clerk in a legal firm, and money was not easily available.
Nor am I certain exactly when he acquired them, and the publications are not dated. According to the series introduction in Volume One (A to Ban, 896 pages, including an essay by John Galsworthy), work on compiling the set actually began in 1915, which means they were most probably published early in the 1920s, after the First World War. This chimes nicely with the family chronology. My father would have collected them either just before he left the Cotswolds to move to south Lincolnshire, or just after he arrived in Long Sutton. Either way, they are a significant symbol of his determination to educate himself.
Today, of course, if you wanted an explanation of nuclear fusion or an appraisal of the current economy of Cuba, or even background facts about Nelson Mandela, then you wouldn't reach for these work-tired and dog-eared volumes. You would look online. But if you wanted information about the First World War, then my goodness, it is here in fulsome abundance. The timing of publication, in that sense, was perfect, and the writing is surprisingly objective.
The Harmsworth nine are still the first volumes I turn to if I'm looking for facts relating to any subject prior to, shall we say, 1925. They also contain not only my father's fluently-written signature, but also mine, in an awkward juvenile scrawl.

SPEED & WHEELS

During that very brief spell in the late 1940s and early 1950s when cycle speedway became popular amongst the young (fleetingly popular, I should say, because its appeal did not linger long at many locations) our gang 'borrowed' a farmer's field in Docking's Halt, Long Sutton (Lincs) and used sticks and jackets to mark out a track. It was a tentative beginning, but our efforts did not last long, either, despite the lure of the speed and the racing, because it quickly became apparent that (a) crashes were commonplace, and (b) the chances of badly damaging your bike were high.
No-one could really afford to allow that to happen, because a smashed wheel or bent forks was likely to put a chap off the road for many weeks, or at least until pocket money savings measured up to the cost of repair and the spare parts. So instead, we decided to cycle off on high days and holidays to a much safer environment at Belle End, a few miles away, where the crowd-pleasing sport of grass track speedway was just beginning to develop.
We went, I think, three or four times, possibly as an alternative to playing football of going to the cinema, because in the years immediately after the War there was not much else to do and crowds, seeking entertainment and thrills, would quite frankly flock in huge numbers to watch almost anything.
Wind the story on to about 1960/61, and to a new location (Norwich), and I landed the job (or was ordered to do it) of speedway correspondent for our evening paper. In those days Norwich Stars were still pulling in 5,000 to 7,000 crowds at the Firs Stadium on Saturday evenings, though they actually had an even greater niche in speedway history. I heard yesteryear tales of 15,000-plus crowds, and speedway Test matches against the Aussies, with the local Press bringing out special editions.
Things were quieter and calmer in the 1960s, and the sport had lost a lot of of its general appeal, but it was still fun, approachable and friendly, and the Firs was the sort of ramshackle place where mum and dad could take the kids for an evening out to enjoy the floodlights, the racket of the engines, the racing, and the socialising. 
Norwich had three big sports stadia in those days (or four if you included Carrow Road), two of them - Boundary Park and City Stadium - being greyhound racing locations. But all three, including the Firs, were allowed to slip off the sporting scene largely because of the lure of housing development. Not before I got a little taste of what speedway must have been like in its heyday, though. I would wander the pits, talking to the riders and the tinkering mechanics, and chat up manager Gordon Parkins (who also kept the Firs pub) to persuade him to drop tit-bits and stories for my column. It was all very relaxed and good natured. Free and easy, almost.
So there was the social side, and the racing (though to be frank, I thought it a tad predictable; I once went through all the heats printed in the programme and picked out every winner). And there was Ove Fundin, who was in a different league. Tall, elegant, dedicated, he won nearly everything nearly all of the time. Even at Wembley. At one stage they tried to handicap him, making him start many yards back, but he still won. Most of the time. Then they sold the Firs, the whole caboodle, and that was the end, and I changed jobs and joined the morning newspaper.
Some of the city's glamour died when they switched off the Firs floodlights for the last time, but it was great stuff while it lasted.

EINSTEIN'S BIRTHDAY?

One of the constant joys of being a newspaper columnist was the unexpected phone call. In the 1970s, when I was Clement Court of the EDP, I received one such call from a gentleman who asked,  'Did you know that Albert Einstein once lived in a wooden hut near Cromer?' No, I didn't, and it was only after all my natural doubts about the caller and the story had been laid to rest that I began to take a serious interest.
Nowadays, many more people know about Einstein in north Norfolk - a 1930s escapee from Nazi persecution - because of plays and booklets and subsequent articles, and I'd like to take some of the credit for that because I do think I helped to re-excavate the yarn after it had been largely buried (or forgotten, anyway) for 40 years.
To an extent, the entire affair was something of a publicity stunt engineered by MP and Naval officer Oliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson, who owned property in the Cromer and Roughton areas and who, in 1933, offered Einstein sanctuary from mounting anti-Jewish campaigns in Germany.
Among other properties, Locker-Lampson owned a 'holiday retreat' on Roughton Heath which comprised three thatched wooden huts, the idea being that the professor might retreat from public view and reside awhile in one of the huts under the protection of Locker-Lampson, two lady secretaries, and a local gamekeeper. Except, the EDP picked up the story after Einstein was spotted in Cromer. The 1933 reporter was thus allowed to interview Einstein, and an item duly appeared in the EDP and other newspapers in September of that year. And despite the security aspect, photographs were also taken and distinguished visitors allowed to trickle in and out.
One of the 1933 photographs showed Einstein with two armed gamekeepers in the background. One of them was Herbert Eastoe, from Lord Suffield's Gunton Estate. The other I tracked down in the 1970s still living in Roughton. He was Eastoe's son-in-law, Albert Thurston, and he told me they were armed with two revolvers, a rifle, and three shotguns.
I asked what Einstein was like. 'He spent a lot of time writing and reading,' he said. 'We didn't have many conversations, but he would chat, usually about the countryside. He never mentioned Germany.' The secretaries, he said, would take the car and fetch provisions, and the milk came from a couple of goats. Sometimes Einstein would stroll over the heath to Roughton Post Office to post his letters. I would follow with a gun,' Mr Thurston recalled. 'Mother would wait with the pram on the road and escort him to the Post Office while I waited behind the hedge. Then I would escort him back again. He would buy sweets, simple things, like a child might but.'
Albert also added more spice to the speculation over exactly how long Einstein lived in the hut. Most accounts agree he was there throughout September, 1933, after which he went to America. Mr Thurston, however, said he thought their visitor might have been in residence even earlier in the year, two memories strengthening his conviction. The first was a recollection of carrying his new son, born in March, 1933, along the track to the huts to show Einstein. The other was Einstein's birthday, for which a cake was made. 'There was a surprise birthday party for him, and I remember that he cried,' said Mr Thurston.  
He showed me two snapshots from an album. One was of a relaxed Einstein, his long hair brushed back over his ears, casually dressed in light-coloured trousers and a shirt with short sleeves, seated outdoors with Locker-Lampson at a tea-table. The second, also outdoors, showed Einstein standing alone beside a table on which was a decorated cake. Trees in the background looked leafless, and Einstein was dressed in a long, thick overcoat and what looked like a woollen skullcap. His birthday, incidentally, was March 14.
The background did not look like summer, or even September, though of course it might have been a 'farewell' cake, the baby might have been several months' old before he was taken on his visit, or autumn might have come early that year. It is difficult to know that happened, but one thing weakens the story. Had Einstein actually been living on Roughton Heath as early as March there would surely have been a record of it. And there isn't, as far as I know.
On the other hand, Cromer Museum's brochure (guide number 15) about Locker-Lampson, which describes the Einstein incident, poo-poohs the birthday idea solely because, in the photo, the broom (or gorse) bushes in the background appeared to be in flower. Well, in the middle March this year the broom in our garden was already in flower.

THE OLD ORDER

I remember reading a football column a few years' ago in which a presumably youthful sports journalist, in discussing England's World Cup victory in 1966, commented that, 'of course, there wasn't much public interest in the competition then.' Well now, laddie, I thought, what you need to do is go and talk to your dad. He'll put you right. A similar train of thought rose to the fore while reading a more recent column in which another writer said that, 'Football in the old days was a friendly affair.' What he meant, I think, was that in the past the relationship between club, player and journalist was carried on at a much more personal level. 
He was probably right. But, of course, it all depends what you call the old days. I wasn't in town when Norwich City faced a severe cash crisis in the 1950s, which brought many old quarrels to a head; but I can certainly remember several occasions, at a time when I was around Carrow Road, when relations between the club and the Press descended into sulky resentment. Of course, these moments were actually few and far between, because both sides of the argument also realised they actually needed each other. On the other hand, I don't think 'friendly' is quite the right word. I seem to remember our relations - and most people were outwardly friendly enough - as necessary and delicate.
Take the period between the 1960s and the early 1970s, which spans my involvement with Norwich City. These were notebook and pencil days, of course. No mobile phones, no Press conferences (unless there was an actual crisis, in which case the chairman would invite us to his tiny office in Tombland), only a belated increase in television interest, no club Press offices or officers, and no real casual contact unless the manager popped into the Press tearoom under the main stand to have an invariably brief and usually diffident post-match chat. And fraught, too. Reporting a match 'live,' as it were, by telephone, to a copy typist back in the office; writing copy against the clock, and phoning it through. That was fraught enough.
Sometimes there were six of us in the old wooden Press box at Carrow Road, sometimes a dozen. If a London club was involved, then Fleet Street might send a couple of grizzled hacks who would spend most of the time grumbling about the length and discomfort of the rail journey, and the hard Press box benches.
But pressured? Again, sometimes. Among the scattered scribes in the Press box would also be reporters from a couple of news agencies (including one lady, incidentally), and sometimes a young Fleet Street hopeful who would try some sort of stunt. So while we haunted the training ground at Trowse waiting for the manager or some of the players to finish their showers, or lolled around at Carrow Road on a Monday morning, hoping to speak to someone, the pressure was actually more insidious than obvious.
Aside from the actual method of 'live' (meaning telephone) reporting, there was also the rivalry between our own morning and evening newspapers. No sharing of copy or titbits there, because we at least tried to maintain a veneer of rivalry and neutrality. And second, there was the thing that pressured us the most - the Sunday newspapers.
In those days nearly all of them carried Football Briefs columns, with paragraphs of club gossip most usually, of course, about who was interested in which player, or who was going to sign whom. Panic-stricken, we dissected these pages down to the last full-stop. Had we been caught out? Yes, we knew about X. And yes, we heard about Y, and have checked it out, and it's all rubbish. And occasionally: 'Oh, gawd, that a new one. The Editor will want a quote on that.' Which meant a Sunday morning phone call to the manager at his home which was often - if your luck was out - answered by his equally fraught wife in the middle of cooking Sunday lunch.
Fraught and friendly sums it up, I suppose.

PEDDARS WAY (3)

Given the evidence, which suggests a military influence on the construction of the Peddars Way, it might be as well to consider when the Roman army was actually in the region, a task which is possible to a certain degree. For example, we can assume that elements of the 9th Hispana Legion at least visited the locality during the years of the Claudian advance (AD43 to 46, perhaps), and that they were in Norfolk and the fens during and after the first Iceni revolt of AD47, and here in reasonable strength following the defeat of Boudica in AD60/61. 
There are at least two further strands of thought, one being that we do not know, and cannot know, of visits by small groups of soldiers, engineers, bigwigs or surveyors betweentimes; and the idea that the actual aftermath of the Boudican revolt, in terms of retribution (no burnt layers have been found in Norfolk), may not have been as brutal and widespread as originally believed. In consequence, and in general, one might say that the Roman military would surely have been in Norfolk in various guises and at various times from AD43 through to, say, AD63 and possibly later. This opens the prospect of a Peddars Way construction programme at some point during a 20-year 'window.'
The two best dates for the army being present in significant strength would be in AD47 and in AD61/62, following the first and second Iceni revolts, but nothing is clear because the actual reasons for building the road are still not entirely clear.
The nature of the post-revolt dates suggests the Way's early usage may well have been as an aid to mopping-up, patrol duties, as a visual deterrent against further trouble, and even as a route to a Wash ferry terminal. It needs to be remembered, however, that the Iceni federation of tribal groupings seems to have been deeply divided and fractious. Also, Boudica did not lead a nationwide uprising. Indeed, it is possible that more people were against her than for her.
What cannot be calculated is the possibility that the road was actually built by locally-recruited work gangs perhaps overseen by military surveyors. But even if it did come into being in this manner, the dating of its construction still fits happily into the same framework of dates. Of course, what happened to it after the 'patrol' and 'ferry' phase, when the region was more or less peaceable, is unclear.
Many who have walked the Way agree that the route offers a much more satisfying journey if its ending is the beach at Holme. In other words, it is better to walk towards the sea rather than away from it. At the same time, some may also agree with me that the Way gives off a very strong feeling that its real purpose was not to expedite travel to the sea, but away from it. To my mind, the Way feels like a route designed to move people and goods inland, away from the coast.
After all, the Roman site that used to be known as Thornham signal station is more likely to have been associated with the later Brancaster fort, not the Way. And as far as is known there were no Legions desperate to be shipped from Holme across the Wash to Lincolnshire. If there were, and if they were stationed at Colchester, it might have been much quicker to have ordered a march to Castle Acre and a turn west on to the Fen Causeway - probably built just after the Boudican revolt - thus circumnavigating the fens without recourse to boats and suitable winds and tides.
On the other hand, if there was a Roman wharf off the present Holme beach, and if the Wash and the north-west Norfolk coast was used by Roman transports as an anchorage or landing point, for reinforcements and supplies to be brought in, then the Way may also have had a role as an inland supply route.
It is my contention that the Peddars Way - cambered and well drained - was built in a hurry somewhere around AD47-63 as a military road running through some troublesome Iceni tribal areas, and that in later years, when the Wash was a busy anchorage, it was used as an inland supply route. However, your guess is as good as mine.

PEDDARS WAY (2)

Current archaeological consensus seems to have it that the Peddars Way (the name is not Roman, by the way) is, in a British sense, an early Roman military road. In some ways it looks like an add-on to the roads network near Stanton Chare, in Suffolk, where another branch of the junction headed towards an Iron Age settlement at Crownthorpe, and ultimately - and with a turn to the east - towards Caistor St Edmund (the Romano-British 'town' of Venta Icenorum was, again, a later development). Caistor also had river connections to the former estuary which, in Roman times, flowed between the later Burgh Castle and Caister forts and as far inland as the Reedham 'peninsular.'
The Peddars Way, on the other hand, ran by two other Iceni settlement areas, in the Brecklands and in north-west Norfolk, and then on towards the coast at Holme-next-the-Sea, where there may have been a quay or landing facilities.
These water connections (river, estuary, sea) are important, for research seems to emphasise that the Iceni were not only farmers and metalworkers, they were also a sea-going folk; while the Romans also developed a sophisticated logistical and re-supply network based on water-borne craft. So water was important. Indeed, travel by water was most likely quicker, easier and cheaper than travel by land. 
The Roman surveyors, most usually attached to the military, were adept at making use of existing pre-Roman tracks and at laying out new routes. Many of the Legions were also adept at road-building, which is not to say that the Way was built by soldiers. Indeed, it might have been built - of local materials - by locally recruited labour gangs perhaps overseen by military surveyors, each gang being responsible for a particular stretch of the road. Indeed, there is an unevenness in the construction of the Way which suggests this could have been so.
For example, some sections of the Way are massive in terms of width (up to 36ft), while others, like the stretch close to the crossing on the modern A17, evidently left a footprint so slight that passage of the Roman road can hardly be seen at all.
In addition to water, time is another factor to be taken into account. The entire construction phase might have taken six or seven months, though no-one knows for certain. It is unlikely, though, that the occupiers would have wanted battle-hardened veteran troops involved in such a menial task for so long as there were, as the saying goes, other fish to fry.
No visible remains of bridges have been identified - there is no suitable stone in Norfolk, so if bridges were built they would probably have been of timber and thus may have perished - though there is the merest hint at Threxton that one might have crossed Watton Brook. Without the handy availability of suitable stone, however, it seems more likely that fords were used, for the Way still crosses several waterways.
The further north-west one goes so water becomes scarcer, for aside from the Heacham river - today reduced to the merest trickle - the line of the route in 'High' Norfolk by and large follows the watershed between rivers running west into the Wash and east into the North Sea via the old estuary.
However, the one thing you can say about the construction of the Peddars Way is that the road's sense of purpose is not to be denied or its urgency decried. Like the nearby Holkham Roman road, it heads unerringly towards the sea. And while its original purpose may seem somewhat obscure today, this was clearly a road in a hurry, possibly even built in a hurry.

PEDDARS WAY (1)

Being a brief three-part personal review of some of the evidence relating to Norfolk's best known and best preserved Roman military road.

Ever since there has ever been any academic interest in Norfolk's Roman roads speculation has surrounded the Peddars Way, and for very good reason. Most ancient roads are difficult to date and often harder to interpret, but the Peddars Way is especially troublesome. On face value it is an old road which at its seaward end runs directly to Holme Next the Sea on the north-west Norfolk coast, and at its southern extremity joins another Roman road at a three-way junction near Stanton Chare in Suffolk. So far so good, but teasing questions remain - namely, who built it, when was it built, and why. And after all the passing years, there are still no clear answers.
There are no clear and definitive interpretations, either, and so in the last few decades the guesswork has continued and ideas have multiplied. For example, these many suggestions have included arguments that the Peddars Way was built:
to assist the movement of troops and supplies to and from a military ferry station, or anchorage, on the Wash or along the north-west Norfolk coast;
as a patrol road and as a means of hurrying troops into troublesome areas;
as a military boundary, to divide warring factions of the Iceni;
as a dividing line between the eastern and western Iceni tribes, affording easier access to the eastern edge of the fens and to the chalk ridge of north-west Norfolk;
as a piece of propaganda aimed at impressing the locals and thus deterring them from engaging in mischief;
as a means of giving troops fast access to at least two important tribal areas, particularly Sedgeford in north-west Norfolk, and Saham Toney/Threxton on the edge of the Brecks, and possibly to the important Iron Age ritual site at Fison Way, Thetford;
as some sort of frontier or demarcation line.
And so on and so forth. And no doubt there is an element of truth in most of them.
Three of the key elements in the argument are these: that because of its construction proportions the road is thought to derive from the Claudian rather than Neronian period, which means the building date might be earlier in the Roman period rather than later (ie, from AD43 to circa AD61); parts of it, at least, appear to have been built on a quite massive scale; and the Stanton Chare junction (where another road leads directly towards the Iceni settlement at Caistor St Edmunds) implies a more-or-less direct connection between Holme and Colchester.
At the same time there is a feeling that at Holme, where the Roman coastline may have been at least 2km further north than it is now, there might have been some sort of wharf or landing stage. But - and just like another oft-quoted theory that some stretches of the Peddars Way utilised earlier Iron Age or even Bronze Age tracks - no actual evidence has been unearthed.
Nor does the known distribution of early Roman forts - perhaps built following the first Iceni revolt in AD47 - give any particular indication as to why the road might have been built. Three of these forts did cluster around a Breckland stretch of the Peddars Way, namely those at Ashill, Saham Toney and Threxton, but they may relate to the Iceni settlements in the vicinity, not to the road. Anyway, no similar early military camps are known in the north-west of the county, close to the coastline. Or at least, none have been identified so far.